Rob Gilligan - Assignment 26 - Adieu

I'm going to split this blog post up into three sections not including this introduction. First, I'll address how I felt about essays and their grading, next I'll discuss my thoughts on the multiple choice questions, and finally I'll talk about miscellaneous other activities throughout the year.

First up, and by far the largest chunk of this year, is the essays and the essay grading. I certainly thought it was helpful that you encouraged all of us to take risks in our writing. I think a lot of us get bogged down in simply trying to get the points, and lose any sense of style. Your constant nudging to try things I wouldn't have often done I think helped develop my writing. All of the prompts were appropriate and representative of the one essay I did get to see on the test. As far as writing the essays goes, I don't think I learned new skills, but in writing I was able to develop skills I already had to create a stronger piece of writing. The grading I have mixed feelings about. I often  thought it was fun, but there were certainly times it got monotonous. Furthermore, at the end of the day, it's your opinion (as a grader and teacher) I care most about, not my classmates'. I usually didn't read any of their marks, but always read your markings because I felt that was far more beneficial to see where I needed to improve. Ultimately, essay grading was an interesting and beneficial exercise, but maybe took up a bit too much time.

Multiple choice. I always dreaded the 45 or 55 question test days. I thought they were super boring, but there isn't much you can really do about that. I thought taking the tests was a good way to get familiar with them, and gauge where my understanding was at. Fortunately for me, I was scoring pretty well on them usually in the mid forties if I recall correctly. However, if I had been struggling, I'm not sure what my course of action would have been. My recommendation would be to have an optional session to go over multiple choice before or after school for maybe half an hour once a week. Since the scores seemed to be very polarized, I think this would offer kids who were struggling a chance to get more insight on the questions, without bogging down students who were scoring well with extra work.

The last section is reserved for everything else we did. I'll try to touch on everything that I can. Of course summer reading is canceled this year, but I did not feel over burdened by it. I was thankful that I was able to have a conversation with my mom about the book rather than having to do a long assignment. I was a bit frustrated that it seemed like some kids got away with not doing it when I put in a lot of time in doing it. Visual Literacy assignments were always fun, but not too helpful for the AP exam. I liked researching advertisements and even creating my own, but don't feel it was helpful for the test. Vocab quizzes weren't too bad, and I think were helpful for providing a bit of a boost to my vocabulary. ACT reviews were brief, but more practice always helps so those were nice. At the beginning I did not put a ton of effort into these blog posts, but I grew to enjoy them, and wish I had put more thought into the first few. I'm sure I'm forgetting some other assignments, but hopefully this is a good encapsulation of the year.

6th hour was almost always a fun class, and I feel like all the work we did was sufficient to prepare me for the exam. Thanks for your hard work.